After the war, Nordhoff spent much of his life on the island of Tahiti, where he and Hall wrote a number of successful adventure books, many adapted for film.

His father was Walter Nordhoff, a wealthy businessman and author of The Journey of the Flame penned under the name "Antonio de Fierro Blanco".

Nordhoff's parents returned to the United States with him in 1889, living first in Pennsylvania, then Rhode Island, and finally settling in California by 1898.

The two authors then returned to the United States, sharing a rented house on Martha's Vineyard, until given a commission by Harper's Magazine to write travel articles set in the South Pacific.

They went to Tahiti in the Society Islands for research and inspiration, and ended up staying, Nordhoff for twenty years, Hall for life.

Nordhoff produced one more solo book, In Yankee Windjammers (1940), a retelling of the ships, sailors, and way of life about which his grandfather had written.

Nordhoff divorced his first wife in 1936, left Tahiti a few years later, and returned to California, where in 1941 he married Laura Grainger Whiley.

[3] During World War II, he had the honor of having a Liberty ship, SS Charles Nordhoff, built in Portland, Oregon, in 1943, named after him.

The 1984 film, The Bounty, was based on other sources, more well-researched views of the actual events of 1789 in which the mutiny results not from maltreatment by Captain Bligh but from the lure of South Pacific life for the ship's crew.